Thursday, September 11, 2008

An unprecedented dip in enrollment in Lodi Unified has district officials contemplating teacher layoffs beginning next year. Lodi Unified schools, specifically elementary schools in north Stockton, are seeing a sharp decline of 356 students this fall. The trend, which is expected to continue into next year, is new to the district, Trustee President Ken Davis said..."We've never lost enrollment; we've always been a growing district," Davis said. "We think it's directly related to the foreclosure crisis. People are moving out of here."

"If we could get to a point where a quarter of sales in Sacramento County were short sales, we would see price stabilization more quickly. The neighborhoods would be maintained and the properties would not be invitations to crime," said Scott Thompson, partner in Mortgage Resolution Services in Carmichael. In July, 70 percent of Sacramento County's escrow closings were homes foreclosed by banks, then discounted for quick sales.

Tenants in a new subdivision who paid their rent on time were shocked to learn their homes are in foreclosure...At least a half dozen neighboring homes on Clay Creek Way in north Sacramento are in various stages of foreclosure according to data from Foreclosures.com. All of them were purchased new from builder AK Custom Homes in 2007 and 2008 and appear to be rentals....Property records shows [Derricka] Jones owns three homes on Clay Creek Way and all three are in default. All of them were purchased this year and information contained in the default notices suggests not a single mortgage payment was ever made.

Under continued pressure to reduce costs, The Bee cut its work force on Wednesday by another 7 percent, this time through voluntary buyouts. The Bee said 87 full- and part-time employees accepted a buyout offer that followed a previous round of layoffs and attrition in June that shrank the staff by 8 percent....Revenue is down 15 percent this year at The Bee's parent, The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento. Advertising has fallen 22 percent at McClatchy's California papers.

California, where McClatchy owns five newspapers, has been one of the markets hardest hit by the housing downturn. In Sacramento, the median home price has fallen 43 percent in three years....Predictably, no one saw it coming—not Wall Street, not the federal government and certainly not McClatchy. “We never anticipated this kind of decline,” [CEO Gary] Pruitt conceded. “We never thought that this would happen. You run all sorts of models and scenarios, but we never thought there would be this kind of decline. Actually, no one predicted this kind of decline for the newspaper industry, this precipitous.”...McClatchy recorded its last full quarter of revenue growth in early 2006. As the economic vortex gained speed and momentum, display-advertising revenue from home builders, big box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s, and medium-sized department and furniture store chains was sucked down the drain...Since Pruitt began engineering the risky, controversial purchase of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain three years ago, McClatchy’s price per share has plummeted nearly 90 percent.

When I saw the News 10 video, I thought, omigod, a news outlet is finally reporting that tenants get a 60-day notice after foreclosure. But then I remembered, having just updated my blog, that the SB 1137 provision requiring that tenants receive written notice of the foreclosure sale and an outline of their rights, just went into effect.